in the world, indeed, seemed to take it for granted; there wasn't

a gap anywhere in that serried front of anticipation--that he would

proudly and cheerfully get aboard it, ascend with it, and fly.



But we know now pretty clearly that simple pride and cheerfulness

in such an act were singularly out of harmony with Filmer's private

constitution. It occurred to no one at the time, but there the fact is.

We can guess with some confidence now that it must have been

drifting about in his mind a great deal during the day, and, from

a little note to his physician complaining of persistent insomnia,

we have the soundest reason for supposing it dominated his nights,

--the idea that it would be after all, in spite of his theoretical

security, an abominably sickening, uncomfortable, and dangerous

thing for him to flap about in nothingness a thousand feet or so

in the air. It must have dawned upon him quite early in the period

of being the Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age, the vision

of doing this and that with an extensive void below. Perhaps

somewhen in his youth he had looked down a great height or fallen

down in some excessively uncomfortable way; perhaps some habit of

sleeping on the wrong side had resulted in that disagreeable falling

nightmare one knows, and given him his horror; of the strength

of that horror there remains now not a particle of doubt.



Apparently he had never weighed this duty of flying in his earlier

days of research; the machine had been his end, but now things

were opening out beyond his end, and particularly this giddy whirl

up above there. He was a Discoverer and he had Discovered.

But he was not a Flying Man, and it was only now that he was beginning

to perceive clearly that he was expected to fly. Yet, however much

the thing was present in his mind he gave no expression to it until

the very end, and meanwhile he went to and fro from Banghurst's

magnificent laboratories, and was interviewed and lionised, and

wore good clothes, and ate good food, and lived in an elegant flat,

enjoying a very abundant feast of such good, coarse, wholesome

Fame and Success as a man, starved for all his years as he had been

starved, might be reasonably expected to enjoy.



After a time, the weekly gatherings in Fulham ceased. The model

had failed one day just for a moment to respond to Filmer's guidance,

or he had been distracted by the compliments of an archbishop.

At any rate, it suddenly dug its nose into the air just a little

too steeply as the archbishop was sailing through a Latin quotation

for all the world like an archbishop in a book, and it came down

in the Fulham Road within three yards of a 'bus horse. It stood

for a second perhaps, astonishing and in its attitude astonished,

then it crumpled, shivered into pieces, and the 'bus horse was

incidentally killed.



Filmer lost the end of the archiepiscopal compliment. He stood up

and stared as his invention swooped out of sight and reach of him.



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